Accessing a sector of a conventional rotating media to read or write data involves delays called a seek time delay and a rotational latency delay. The seek time delay measures a time for a head assembly on an actuator arm to travel to a track of a disk platter where the data is read or written. The rotational latency is a delay waiting for the rotation of the disk platter to bring the requested sector to the head assembly. Both types of delay impact data transfer performance. The impact can be significant during random reads and/or writes.
It would be desirable to implement a sector translation layer for hard disk drives.